India lays down 'open' challenge
May 12, 2006, Bill Thompson, BBC
This columnist describes his interactions with Indian programmers who are using the freedom of Linux distribution licences to create instrumental technologies themselves. He believes India is beginning a new phase in its use of free and open source software. This work is more than just adapting code from the US and Europe, it includes "localising" code by incorporating local languages. However, Indian coders remain disconnected and contribute to projects but do not specifically focus on solving Indian problems; hence a real free software community has yet to develop. While the Indian government sees the financial benefits of using open source, government departments neither share their work with others, nor contribute to other projects, which the author perceives as an unfortunate oversight. Nevertheless, Indian open source programmers will make Linux code more useful to Indians than proprietary software has been, which will direct the course of free software development.